TL;DR: You can buy stock with the proceeds of your sale the morning after the sale executes. If you want to move those funds to your bank account, it takes about a week.

When is my sell order executed?

Right now, Stockpile executes orders using end-of-day prices. Because our time-machine is in the shop, we must wait until the actual end of the trading day at 4pm Eastern to get your price. Sometimes it takes a little while to reflect the updated positions in your account, but you should see the cash in your account by the following morning.

So I can make another trade with my proceeds right away?

Yes! As soon as the sale is reflected in your Stockpile account, you can use that cash to purchase more stock. Just keep in mind that your purchase order will execute using the end-of-day price. So if you place your sell order on a Monday at 8am, your cash will be available for trading Monday around 5pm, and if you place a buy order that evening, your purchase order won’t execute until Tuesday at 4pm.

What I really want is to sell and move the proceeds to my bank account.

It takes about a week for two reasons: 1) there’s a settlement period for a stock sale, and 2) there’s a clearing period for the transfer to your bank. A sample timeline looks like this:

Monday at 8am: You place your sell order.

Tuesday morning: Cash is made available to you in your Stockpile account for trading, but not for withdrawals to your bank because…

Wednesday: Behind the scenes, when you sold your stock on Monday, our clearing firm arranged to finalize your transaction two days hence. So it isn’t until now that your cash actually settles into your account. Why does it work this way? You have to imagine a paper-based world where you might sign a contract on Monday agreeing to sell stock at a specific price, and everyone gets 2 days to get their paperwork and funding in order to complete the transaction. Stock trading has moved past the paper, but the clearing process is still how the entire industry works.

Wednesday evening: Now that funds are available for withdrawal, you can move them to your bank. This process, for similar reasons described above, takes about 3 business days.

Next Monday: So 3 business days after you made your withdrawal, funds arrive in your bank account.

SIPC was created to protect the investor in the case of fraud or bankruptcy.

Does not cover ordinary market loss when securities can fall in value.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to your stocks if something ever happened to Stockpile? Has it been a deterrent in getting started?

Investing your hard-earned dollars can be scary, man! That’s why Stockpile is a paying member of SIPC. (Hint: Pronounced like sip-ick, say it at a party at people will think you’re really smart). It’s basically insurance for your stocks in case anything should ever happen to us here at Stockpile. The same way you pay for your car insurance in case there is an accident, we pay for your investment insurance.

Congratulations, you took a big step in investing and bought your very first stock! Now the question remains, where is that stock traded? You may have heard of the New York Stock Exchange or seen someone ring “the closing bell,” but you never really understood what that meant. Today, let us dive deep into exchanges.

Stands for National Association of Securities Dealer Automated Quotations.

Composed of all the stocks on the Nasdaq market – more than 5,000.

It is the main benchmark index for U.S. technology stocks.

Largest electronic equities exchange in the U.S.

We have already touched on two of the major indexes: the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Now it is time to tackle another popular index: theNasdaq. The Nasdaq is short for the National Association of Securities Dealer Automated Quotations, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So they shortened it to NASDAQ.

Have you ever seen a 10-year-old boy telling his financial advisor to buy 10 shares of Apple? Or a 13-year-old girl placing an order to sell half her Tesla stock? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean kids and teens can’t own stock. They can – thanks to a special account known as an UTMA or custodial account.